This Blog suggested - (Blog April 11th. 2017) that the reason behind President
Trump's sayings and doings - unsayings
and undoings too - is to do what ancient emperors did, keep
everyone on tenterhooks afraid to move for fear of losing the imperial favour,
being hired today , fired next week all to create not a strong Presidency but a
strong president , not one strong
America but one strong American.
Creating tensions with both enemies and friends is a strategy to show
who is boss in any case. We Oldies in Europe grew up in a world of Dictators
and know how it happens, Spain, Portugal,Italy, Germany, Russia, and fascist
movements in Ireland, Britain, France....These
days we seem to forget that Europe is a very recent convert to the concept of
democracy not the cradle of it. But Old Fellows sitting
at the city gates remember.
Now this Old Man at the City Gates is back after an
episode of a broken leg and some broken hopes and he thinks he sees the
situation not just worryingly similar
but worryingly worse.
Internal disruption in the USA , street riots, threats hurled from
America to N Korea and back , international loss of the dignity not only of a government making a mess of things but
of government in general. If Donald
Trump had been defeated in the election , or if he had been confronted soon
after it with a real threat of impeachment
some of the tensions in American life could have been damped down . Now
however, any attempt to remove the
president ranging from physical attack
to leisurely impeachment could easily be
a spark to inflame passions even more. In a country where so many people can possess not just arms but arsenals by constitutional
right , where there are tensions
between the States' and the United States' administrations, racial problems,
widespread poverty, something more rational has to be done than distract the passions of citizens by tweets or verbal rockets from the golf course.
A favourite tactic by
politicians and military under threat or seeking status is to have a war.
Winston Churchill - who said he could not understand why his country's
government would not a open up a front in the Dardanelles because, "
....after all", he said," it would only cost a few hundred lives, French
generals defeated in battle who said, "Another
20,000 troops and we could have
succeeded...." found war useful not only to acquire foreign power, land and resources but to strengthen home government. Thatcher had a war, Blair had a war, the
leaders of N Korea and of the USA threaten war
because their leadership as they see it demands it. For Donald Trump the creation of uncertainty and dependence on the imperial
pleasure is as real now as in Nero's day. Some American newspapers have
compared Trump's methods to those of Julius Caesar, but Nero's
come closer . The image of Trump tweeting while Homs burns still stands.
It may be said that talk of civil war in the USA and dissolution of the states is just alarmist.
But no union of states or people is forever. Hitler's Reich was to last for a
thousand years, it lasted only a few. The European empires dissolved, so did the Soviet Union. The
European Union may disunite or not, nobody really knows. The USA suffers rancour about wasting money on foreign wars
that cannot be won as in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere. Making
war far away from home does not help any more - people invent their own
responses to that with everyday means like
motor vans and gas cylinders causing terror even to those whose governments have more technolgy for war than they could ever need.
If the United nations were willing and able it could perhaps
do something to discipline those whose wars have caused millions of deaths, starvations
and miseries. But it has proved a disappointment just as the League of Nations did to previous generations. The best we can do - Old Folk at the City Gates
or nowhere in particular who have seen
it all before - is understand and say what we believe is
happening and hope we can all do that together. We can still hope that our American friends may have a President truly worthy of them.
Then America could indeed hope to become great. So could we
all.
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Casual thought : So "fighting civil war
politics" in Ireland was a shame and
something we Irish do......? Spare a
thought for civil war politics in America which has emerged strong again after
so many years........it's what people do........
